Urgent Billing Transparency and Invoice Discrepancy Review

Support Help
1

Hello Retell AI team:

We currently manage several sub-accounts and various AI agents running large-scale outbound calling campaigns within our account.

The main issue is that the current dashboard and exported reports don’t provide the necessary transparency for proper billing audits.

We’re experiencing a significant discrepancy between the call durations shown in the dashboard/exported reports and the final billed amounts. Before completely canceling the service, we urgently need clarification to determine if this is a temporary or configuration error that can be resolved.

We’re currently observing the following:

  • The call durations shown in the exported reports are relatively short.

  • However, the final billed amounts are considerably higher than expected.

  • The actual cost per minute ends up being much higher than the advertised price.

Because billing is aggregated across multiple agents and sub-accounts, it is extremely difficult to understand:

  • the exact billed duration,
  • what is actually considered billable time,
  • the actual cost generated by each AI agent,
  • and whether additional costs not visible in the exported reports are being applied.

Currently, the reports lack the level of detail necessary for a reliable financial audit.

We urgently need:

  • Exact billable duration per call
  • Breakdown of costs per call
  • Breakdown of costs per agent
  • Separation of telephony/SIP/LLM/STT/TTS costs
  • Clarification on whether call time, silence, voicemail, missed calls, or connection time are billable
  • A reliable method for reconciling exported reports with final invoices

With the current level of visibility, it is extremely difficult to verify the accuracy of the billing.

I am sending you a real-world example corresponding to calls made yesterday for your review (we can send additional examples from other days if needed).

1,044 calls were made between the following agents:

  • agent_cd6703eaeeb2e8a137e11bf543
  • agent_1356aeee9316212b66bbeda892

Observed results:

  • Only 567 calls were answered.

  • The total effective duration shown in the exported report is approximately 22 minutes and 10 seconds.

  • However, the billed amount associated with these calls is approximately $32.69.

Based on the advertised price of approximately $0.12 per minute, the expected cost for 22 minutes should be around $2.66, not above $32.

This means that the actual effective cost we are paying is approximately $1.47 per minute, more than 10 times higher than expected.

We need urgent clarification on the following points:

  1. What exact metric is being billed?

  • Talk duration?

  • Full session duration?

  • Connection duration?

  • Voicemail detection time?

  • Silence time?

  • AI processing time?

  1. Why does the exported dashboard report not match the final billed duration?

  2. Do missed, unanswered, or voicemail-directed calls generate billable minutes?

  3. Are additional telephony/SIP/STT/TTS/LLM costs being added that are not directly visible on the dashboard?

  4. Could you provide a detailed breakdown of exactly how the final billed amount was calculated?

In summary, we suspect one of the following situations may be occurring:

  • A minimum billable call duration exists
  • Automatic rounding of call durations
  • Billing initiated during the call/connection time
  • Billing for voicemail or silent connections
  • Additional telephony/SIP/processing costs not clearly reflected in the exported reports

We need a precise explanation regarding:

  • the exact metric being used for billing,
  • whether calls are rounded,
  • whether a minimum billable duration exists,
  • whether unanswered or voicemail-directed calls incur costs,
  • and how the exported reports can be reconciled with the final invoices.

We would appreciate an urgent review and clarification.

Sincerely,

2

Hey @ipropertyx.group Thanks for the details, Can you share your Org ID?

3

@mark1 - any chance you can speak to the policy of this? I am budgeting for my use cases as well and had this question:

Are ring times billed by Retell beyond a telnyx/twilio cost?

Does Retell bill a full minute for this: a person picks up the phone, says nothing, then hangs up?

Does Retell bill a full minute for this: the voicemail answering machine picks up?

4

Hello,

**Per-agent breakdown for that day:**

  • agent_1356aeee9316212b66bbeda892 — 44 calls, 23min
  • agent_cd6703eaeeb2e8a137e11bf543 — 1,000 calls, 238.57 min

image-418224e7.pngimage-dbea789c.png

You had 550+ working calls.

This call alone is 10 min: call_1de2ec57452273fc4007fd5f95e

So it can’t be that the total for 550+ calls is only 22 min.

I think when you summed the durations on the sheet, you didn’t convert them into duration format.

We do not bill for a full minute if it was a voicemail or a short call; we bill per second.

5

Thank you Omar

So you begin billing the Retell/TTS/AI at the call.initiated or at the call.answered?

I assume I can make a determination in the AI Agent workflows to abort at voicemail?

6

Hey @cmiller

  1. Are ring times billed by Retell beyond the Telnyx/Twilio cost?
    No. Retell bills based on actual call duration, which begins when the call connects (called party picks up), not when ringing begins. Ring time is only carrier/telephony pass-through (Twilio/Telnyx) — Retell does not add its per-minute charge on top of ring time. But please see the details of short call surcharge here: https://docs.retellai.com/accounts/billing-exceptions

  2. Does Retell bill a full minute if a person picks up, says nothing, then hangs up?
    No flat full minute — we bill by actual call duration. The one exception: when Dynamic Opening Message is enabled (AI speaks first with a dynamically generated greeting), there is a 10-second minimum to cover the LLM processing of that dynamic greeting. So a 2-second pickup-and-hangup would be billed as 10 seconds in that case, and as the actual ~2 seconds otherwise.

  3. Does Retell bill a full minute if the voicemail answering machine picks up?
    No flat full minute — billed by actual call duration. However, voicemail-answered calls are not zero-cost: voicemail detection consumes LLM cycles while determining that voicemail was reached, so there is a small cost for the seconds the agent is on the line.

To minimize this, enable voicemail detection with “Hang up if reaching voicemail” in your agent’s Call Settings — the agent disconnects immediately on detection rather than waiting or leaving a message. Detection runs for the first 3 minutes of the call. Docs: https://docs.retellai.com/build/handle-voicemail

One additional billing rule worth noting: if the agent’s effective prompt (system prompt + tool definitions + transcript + tool-call history) exceeds 3,500 tokens, the billed duration is scaled proportionally (Scaling Factor = tokens ÷ 3,500). This is commonly triggered by Flex-mode conversation flows.

Thank You